Tagged: art
Assemblage & Collage (or, “To Gather and To Bind”)
Ecclesia. Dr. Dams Up Water, Sui Juris, Professor-General (153d CORPS), Dept. of Information Systems Intelligence Service (DISIS), Universitas Autodidactus | by prompt engineering an artificial intelligence engine [‘Mindsoft.ai’] | presents
Cut and Paste Sovereignties: The Collage, the College, and the Crisis of Assemblage
Abstract
This paper interrogates the porous ontologies of collage and assemblage as they leak promiscuously into the bureaucratic imaginaries of the college and the assembly. Through a prismatic reading of scissors, glue, governance, and grievance, this essay argues that the syntactical operations of aesthetic fragmentation mirror the metaphysical operations of democratic representation. In short: to cut is to legislate; to paste is to govern.
1. Introduction: When Art School Met Parliament
The twenty-first century, an epoch obsessed with interdisciplinarity, has witnessed a convergence of two previously autonomous practices: the aesthetic collage and the bureaucratic college. Both are sites of selection, exclusion, and accreditation. Both depend upon an unacknowledged substrate of adhesives—whether material (glue stick) or ideological (institutional mission statement).
Meanwhile, the assemblage, once a mere art-historical cousin of collage, has found new life as a model for political subjectivity. Philosophers from Deleuze to the Department of Political Science now proclaim that we are all “assemblages” of affect, interest, and student loan debt. Yet, if every assembly is an assemblage, can every assemblage be a parliament?
2. The Syntax of Cut: Scissors as Syllogism
In collage, the cut functions as both wound and syntax. It divides the field, establishing relationality through rupture. Similarly, the college cuts: it admits some and rejects others, slicing the social fabric along lines of “fit,” “merit,” and “legacy.” The admissions committee thus operates as the aesthetic editor of the polis—arranging the raw materials of adolescence into a legible future citizenry.
Where the artist cuts paper, the registrar cuts dreams.
3. Glue as Governance: Adhesion, Accreditation, and the State
Glue, long ignored by political theory, deserves recognition as the unsung material of sovereignty. In collage, it is the binding agent that turns fragmentation into coherence; in the college, it manifests as bureaucracy, accreditation, and alumni newsletters.
This sticky ontology recalls Hobbes’s Leviathan, wherein the sovereign glues together the body politic. Without glue—or governance—the artwork and the polity alike devolve into piles of loose ephemera: shredded syllabi, ungraded essays, campaign posters, tuition invoices.
4. Assemblage and Assembly: Toward a Materialist Parliamentarism
If collage is the metaphorical undergraduate of modernity, assemblage is its postgraduate seminar. Where collage arranges fragments flatly, assemblage extends them into space, into lived, precarious relationalities.
In political terms, the assembly likewise enacts a spatial performance: bodies in proximity producing meaning through adjacency. An assembly is a three-dimensional collage in motion, an arrangement of human cutouts attempting—often unsuccessfully—to cohere around a resolution.
The question, then, is not whether art imitates politics, but whether both are merely mixed-media projects with delusions of unity.
5. The College as Collage: Institutional Aesthetics of Admission
We might finally recognize the college itself as a collage of ideologies—meritocracy pasted over inequality, diversity brochures over exclusionary endowments. The campus tour is a performative walk through an installation piece entitled Meritocracy (Mixed Media, 1636–Present).
The faculty meeting functions as an assemblage in the purest sense: heterogeneous entities (professors, adjuncts, administrators, snacks) gathered temporarily to debate the future of glue allocation (budgets).
6. Conclusion: Toward a Post-Adhesive Democracy
In the age of algorithmic governance and tuition hikes, collage and college alike face the same existential dilemma: how to maintain coherence without authoritarian adhesives. Perhaps the task is no longer to glue but to hover—to practice a politics of suspended fragments, a democracy of the unglued.
As artists and citizens, we must learn to embrace the cut, to wield our scissors not as tools of exclusion but as instruments of infinite recomposition.
For in the end, all representation—whether artistic or parliamentary—is but a question of arrangement.
Cut and Paste Sovereignties II: Collage, College, and the Third Letterist International
Abstract
This expanded investigation situates the syntactical economies of collage and the metaphysical infrastructures of the college within the emergent politico-aesthetic ecologies of the Third Letterist International. Drawing on recent cross-contaminations between university English departments and guerrilla street-art cells, this paper examines how semiotic sabotage, typographic activism, and epistemological paste intersect with the anti-fascist “Antifada” land-back movement. Ultimately, it argues that both the radicalized right and left are engaged in competing collage practices—each cutting and pasting reality to fit its desired composition. The result: a dialectical mess best described as assemblage anxiety.
7. The Third Letterist International: From Margins to Manifesto
In the late 2010s, a group of underemployed adjunct poets and spray-paint tacticians announced the Third Letterist International (3LI)—a successor, or rather détournement, of the mid-twentieth-century Letterist Internationals that once haunted Parisian cafés. 3LI declared that “syntax is the last frontier of resistance,” and that “every cut in language is a cut in power.”
Unlike its Situationist predecessor, which preferred to dérive through cities, 3LI dérives through syllabi. It occupies the margins of MLA-approved anthologies, recontextualizing canonical footnotes as sites of insurgency. Members reportedly practice “semiotic collage,” blending footnotes, graffiti, and university mission statements into sprawling textual murals.
In this sense, 3LI operates simultaneously as an art movement, a faculty union, and a campus club with no budget but infinite grant applications. Their motto, scrawled across both bluebooks and brick walls, reads:
“Disassemble, dissertate, disobey.”
8. Street Pedagogy: When English Departments Go Rogue
The Third Letterist International represents the latest phase of what theorists call pedagogical insurgency—the moment when the English Department, long confined to grading essays and moderating panel discussions, turns outward, confronting the street as an extended seminar room.
Faculty and activists co-author manifestos in chalk; office hours occur under overpasses; tenure committees are replaced by “committees of correspondence.” The “peer review process” has been literalized into street-level dialogue between peers (and occasionally, riot police).
Thus, the old academic dream of “public scholarship” finds its avant-garde realization in public vandalism.
9. The Antifada and the Land-Back Collage: A Politics of Recomposition
Parallel to this linguistic insurgency, the Antifada land-back movement has reconfigured the terrains of both property and poetics. The Antifada’s name, an intentional linguistic collage of “antifa” and “intifada,” reclaims the act of uprising as a mixed-media gesture: half protest, half performance art.
Central to their praxis is recompositional politics—the idea that both land and language can be cut, repasted, and reoccupied. Where settler colonialism framed land as canvas and capital as glue, the Antifada proposes an inverse operation: tearing up the map, redistributing the fragments, and calling it a new landscape of belonging.
Here, the aesthetic metaphor of collage becomes political material: who gets to cut? who gets pasted back in? what happens when the glue is gone, and everything hovers in a provisional equilibrium of mutual care and unresolved tension?
10. The Far Right as Accidental Collagists
Ironically, the radicalized right—those self-proclaimed defenders of coherence—have themselves become unintentional practitioners of collage. Their online spaces are digital scrapbooks of conspiracy and nostalgia: medieval heraldry pasted over memes, constitutional fragments glued to anime stills.
Their epistemology is bricolage masquerading as ontology. Each narrative is a cutout, each belief a sticker affixed to the myth of national wholeness. In vilifying the Antifada and 3LI as “cultural Marxists” or “linguistic terrorists,” the right reveals its own aesthetic anxiety: that its ideological glue, once epoxy-thick, has thinned into the watery paste of algorithmic outrage.
Thus, both radical poles—left and right—participate in a shared semiotic economy of fragmentation, differing only in whether they lament or celebrate the cut.
11. The Dialectic of Radicalization: Between Cut and Countercut
The political field has become an editing bay. The radicalized right splices together nostalgia and paranoia; the radicalized left cuts history into openings for potential futures. Each accuses the other of montage malpractice.
This dialectic reveals a deeper truth: both operate under the logic of the collage. The difference lies not in form but in glue—whether the adhesive is empathy or ressentiment, whether the cut heals toward multiplicity or enclosure.
As Walter Benjamin might have written (had he survived into the age of Adobe Creative Suite): the struggle of our time is between those who collage the world to open it, and those who collage it to close it.
12. Toward an Epistemology of the Second Cut
In this interstitial moment, 3LI and Antifada embody the politics of the second cut—a refusal of closure, a commitment to continuous recomposition. Their slogan “No Final Drafts, Only Revisions” reimagines revolution as perpetual editing: the rewriting of history through acts of aesthetic and material reclamation.
The university, once imagined as a fortress of knowledge, becomes instead a collage in crisis—a surface upon which the graffiti of the future is already being written, erased, and re-scrawled.
13. Conclusion: The Unfinished Adhesive
The collage, the college, the assemblage, and the assembly—these are not discrete entities but overlapping grammars of belonging and dissent. The Third Letterist International offers not a program but a practice: to write politically and paste poetically, to legislate through syntax, to assemble through aesthetics.
If the far-right fears fragmentation, and the far-left seeks to inhabit it, then perhaps our task is neither restoration nor rupture, but curation: to tend to the cracks, to preserve the possibility of rearrangement.
In the end, we are all fragments looking for better glue.
v.25.12.29.14.16
The Undermining of the Heart of Vandals
By Antarah Crawley
For Professor McRuer,
Critical Methodologies
9 November 2011, GWU
WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you drive or walk or, more likely, ride your fixed gear down the city’s busiest thoroughfare New York Avenue past 7th street you’ll see an imposing mural of a young brown boy with a cap depicting an upside-down DC flag peeking up out of a dystopian landscape reminiscent of Mew Mexico’s Bisti Badlands. The painted caption, “Welcome to Dystopia City” invokes the notion that all is not well here. Indeed, within the city there is a conflict of interest between a young, browning generation and the established hegemony, between corporations and small business, between those who have a voice and those who don’t. And the artists, whose hands are also colored with paint and adhesive, have largely taken up the cause to make the corporate hegemony accountable to their disruptive actions. In this paper I look at the actions of DC artists, who use the most symbolic city in the western hemisphere as a canvas for social correction, and the responses it stirs among those in power. And furthermore, in the very notions of power itself.
In fall of 2010, corporate oil-giant Chevron planned to execute a campaign that sought to fix public opinion of them after attention was drawn to their crude waste removal tactics in Ecuador. According to a team of professionals suing Chevron (formerly Texaco) for their human rights violations in multiple locations across the world, and specifically in Ecuador, the oil giant has been deliberately disposing toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon—an estimated 18.5 billion gallons from 1964 to 1990, or 4 million gallons per day at the height of their operation. Even though they had managed to elude liability costs (a potential $27.3 billion) their public image had been damaged, thus they sought to repair it with a campaign that utilized a gritty street-art aesthetic and phrases that showed their corporate executives agreeing with “everyday, working class” Americans (e.g., “Oil companies should put their profits to good use—We Agree”, “Big oil should support small business—We Agree”, etc.)
In an effort to make their message more accessible to the public, Chevon reached out to local artists to put their posters up in an authentic, street art way, using wheatpaste and paint rollers. Cesar Maxit, a DC-based street artist, was one of the artists targeted to execute this operation. However, Mr. Maxit is not one to comply with the wishes of big oil. He has a long history of social activism and of using art, legally and illegally, towards that capacity. He says in an interview:
…I had started working with environmental and human rights groups, I wanted to write messages about social justice. My first burner was a piece that said “Free Tibet.” My second was one that had a line of white-hooded Klansmen with the city skyline behind it, and in the negative space between it said “FREE MUMIA” followed by “amerikkka racist.” This was in 2000.
Cesar Maxit
Thus, when Chevron sent him the files for the campaign, which still contained their original messages, he called his friends in The Yes Men (tagline: Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Our targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an environmental activist organization begun in 1985 (mission statement: Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action), to collaborate on a counter-campaign. Maxit, in a documentary short about the counter-campaign, says the aim of Chevon in its efforts is to “confuse the public.” He, along with The Yes Men and RAN, altered the original Chevon files to read messages that were more precise, more radical (e.g., “Oil companies should clean up their messes.”). Instead of retaining the images of working class Americans, he used the faces and words of the Ecuadorian peoples that the corporation actually affected, thus radicalizing the campaign in a way that Chevron had not intended.
The questions that this counter-attack (which resulted in Chevron pulling the campaign completely) raises revolve around the mythologies surrounding responsibility and authenticity. Could the campaign have been authentically “agreeable” without the help of actual street artists? What does a campaign like this symbolize, even when Chevron has not actually committed to cleaning up its mess in Ecuador? At the base of it all, what is the role of the street artists in this scenario? Is his role to help corporations get back on track, or to call attention to their faults? If Chevron had actually continued with the campaign (and even with the altered versions already up on the street), whose campaign is it? Who is the author? And lastly, why DC?
Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author would have anticipated such response from the street art/activist community. Mr. Maxit has physically done what the reader in Barthes does every time he reads a text—he deconstructs it; he takes the text and, without considering what the author intended, which is ultimately futile because the author is a confused self-destructive entity, he reassess the “blends and clashes” inherent in the text (1324). Barthes writes, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (1324). Chevron acts as the “Author-God” that has been abstracted out. With the remaining text, which reads, for example, “Big Oil should get real”, the author, Mr. Maxit, RAN, and so on, detangles what is being said. In an interview, Mitch Anderson, a spokes man for the San Francisco-based organization, Amazon Watch, asks rhetorically, “Does Chevron think that we’re stupid?” As the author, they are putting words on a page that come in contact with other entities, actions surrounding their statements. The reader takes all of these aspects inherently into consideration when analyzing a statement like “Big oil should get real.” Cesar Maxit asks, “‘Get real’? Well, what does that mean? Of course we all agree with that. But what about ‘Oil companies should clean up their messes?’ Do you agree with that? I think most people would agree with that, but I think Chevron doesn’t.” Here, the reader has destroyed the voice. It epitomizes Barthes’s statement that, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody [and] contestation…” (1325). In the end, this campaign has actually served to promote further scrutiny into Chevron’s actions. It’s authorship has written its own rebuttal. By getting street artists to interact with the campaign, it has entered the reader into the execution of the text. This puts multiple hands on the “original” message and renders is read before it actually goes public.
This actually brings up another level of readership. On one level, Maxit and the activist community are reading the ads. Yet they put them up in the public sphere, thus entering the text into another, secondary level of readership. Though it’s not as well documented or extensive as the primary reading, we still see the artist entering into his own death. The product will now be read at face value—as a Chevron ad that shows the corporation explicitly admitting to wrongdoing. This may lead the secondary reader to believe that the company is actually trying to get its act together. Once again, the message of the author—now the artist—is obliterated and the reader assumes the power of interpretation. The text never becomes the product of one author; it is always a collaborative space. As Barthes writes, “Writing [or in this case, art/publicity/advertising] is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative space where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing” (1322).
Antarah, you’ve chosen a really interesting focus that’s, I think, much clearer than it was in the first draft. You’re also going in an unexpected and interesting direction with it–I’d have expected you to perhaps go after Deutsch or Foucault, but I think this is really interesting. As noted in the margin, you will need another theorist from class besides Barthes. It sounds like Derrida might be a good one. Or, if you want to think more about the larger frame of discourse, DC as a symbolic city, whose discourse on the level of architecture is disrupted by street art, then Foucault (or Deutsch) might help. At any rate, it’s a fascinating project!
Grade: A
© 2011 by Antarah Crawley
Art¢oin:\>_Theory and Methodology
Preamble
Each real Art¢oin (¢) is a serialized Non-Fungible Token (NFT) representing one hundred (100) shares in the art work-product of the Scribe Antarah Crawley (the “Artist”). Each share of each real Art¢oin is also called a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) or “token”. These tokens may be bought and sold on an exchange or on the free market just like any trading unit, whether it be art, gold, or Bitcoin. Acquisition of Art¢oin NFT shares represents acquisition of stock (or “shares”) in the entity (or “company”) constituted by the art work-product of the Artist, Scribe Antarah Crawley.
Appreciation in the value of the total volume of art work-product in circulation and on deposit represents an appreciation in the market value of the Company of the Artist, and shall inure to the benefit of its shareholders. One in possession of a share, or token, of the Company shall be de facto shareholder, however, each and every token should be exchanged under an “Agreement of Original Transfer of Work of Art” (or “contract”) establishing the rightful collector (or shareholder) together with a description and sale price of the subject art work, in pursuance of sound bookkeeping.
Value in Artwork
Art is work product that is valued for its unique qualities of scarcity and desirability. Such qualities are derived from many factors, including the person of the artist, the execution of the artist, the intention of the artist, the attention of the artist, the subject matter content of the work, the medium of the work, the lifetime of the work, and the effect upon the viewer, among many other factors. For these reasons, art made of materials worth literally nothing can fetch millions in exchange on the free market. In fact, digital non-material NFTs have sold for as much as $69 million at auction. Therefore art is a great asset that can hold and appreciate value like gold. Therefore it is a form of “hard money”.
Water Theory of Capital
1.0. There is a vast “sea” of value, represented by fluctuating wave-particles called “currency”.
1.1. When value flows freely in a “current” (through a market), then it is “liquid”. But when is it held up in an asset or other liability, then it is not liquid, because it cannot flow freely.
1.2. To get liquid currency from the “sea” to the “shore” where people use it to “work the fields” there must be river “banks” that conduct the liquid current “downstream”. Banks facilitate a capillary system whereby the value of the sea flows to the inland.
1.3. People irrigate new streams of income all the time. One must first identify a source of water, which is the market from which they will draw liquid. Then they must use tools to irrigate a stream to flow from the market to their place of business. These tools are means of production, with the resulting channel being the work-product which conducts the liquid currency to them. (It is worth noting that most institutional banks sit on naturally occurring rivers and bodies of water and are designed to be gatekeepers, or dams, to liquidity.)
2.0. An enterprise of any kind must float upon the sea of capital; for if it does not float, then it will become underwater.
2.1. This is to say that water a ship floats upon is good credit, but water that has gotten into the ship is bad debt that can sink the ship.
2.2. How shall the enterprise remain afloat? It is by and through good “leadership” and “stewardship” and “ownership” and “membership” as well as a firm league of “friendship”.
2.3. What, then, shall convey this company of ships down the river stream of income? It is by and through the ships’ “sales”.
The Liquidation and Circulation of Artwork
Considering the real and potential value of the art market, two important questions arise:
How can artists build liquidity into their work?
How can artists become art market makers?
Our Solution: back each unique work of art with something of intrinsic value in a form that can be readily circulated. The artist can increase the liquidity of their work by rendering their work in easy-to-trade units, or “trade units”, of art work. Of what should these units be made? We find that copper and other metals like silver and gold are much more liquid and valuable than canvas. The Artist can multiply the value of this base material by the work that the Artist inscribes upon it. The Artist can produce x art works per day, each one being a uniquely wrought and serialized unit of work: a non-fungible, or irreplaceable, token (an “NFT”). The craft production of NFTs organically controls the issuance and supply of such NFTs. With every sale, the value of the Artist’s work may appreciate. Smart contracts served via blockchain may enable artists to be paid dividends and royalties on all future transactions of the NFT. Thereby the Artist might become the market makers of certain art submarkets.
Blockchain Contracting
The contract for the transfer of a work of art may be decentralized from any physical location and operationalized without the physical meeting of the parties.
The contract itself may be a publicly available, pro-forma text which may be completed and submitted anywhere there is internet access. The contract binds the Collector to the Artist under clearly established terms for present and future transactions on the unique NFT artwork.
A Company of the Artist
By extension of such a blanket agreement executed between all parties in every sale, the parties establish a de facto company of the Artist in which all Collectors are shareholders holding company shares (the NFTs) that fluctuate according to the principles of the free market.
(Last modified 13 Apr. 21; 4 May 21; 10 May 21; 21 Sep 23)
Supreme Exchange 